By Jeffery Patterson, Executive Director, Texas Catholic Conference

It’s hard to believe that a nation founded two centuries ago upon principles of religious freedom and tolerance must fight to retain those principles today.  Nevertheless, here we are, as a country, confronting those who seek to stifle religious values and practice from public life.

For some time, we have witnessed a steady erosion of religious liberty in the face of a growing cultural and political secularism.  As a Church, we live our faith through works of education, health care, and charity for the poor and disadvantaged.  Increasingly, however, we find ourselves having to fend off those who want to impose demands or restrictions that go against our fundamental beliefs.

The issue has been pushed so far that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) decided last June to make religious liberty one of their top priorities and asked Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to lead a newly formed Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty.

Before Thanksgiving, during the U.S. bishops’ annual fall meeting in Baltimore, Bishop Lori identified for his brother bishops a pattern in our recent culture and lawmaking that dismisses religion as merely a private matter between an individual and his or her God and not a fundamental basis of citizenship and of civil society.

“Instead of promoting toleration of differing religious views, some laws, some court decisions, some administrative regulations treat religion not as a contributor to our nation's common morality but rather as a divisive and disruptive force better kept out of public life," Bishop Lori said.

Much of the frustration involves a handful of recent policy decisions regarding reproductive services. For example, a new Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) rule requires employers to include, free of charge, a full range of reproductive procedures—including abortion, artificial contraception, and sterilization—as part of their health insurance packages.  In the past, federal law and almost all state laws allowed exceptions to religious organizations who could claim that certain areas of health care coverage were not acceptable to the employer's religious beliefs--particularly exemptions that respected the consciences of Catholic employers regarding artificial contraceptives and abortions.

The new regulation narrows the definition of a “religious exemption” to include only religious employers that employ or serve members of their own denomination or who work to advance their own religion.  Such exemptions  would force every Catholic agency — Catholic churches, hospitals, and schools — to either terminate employee health insurance plans or to violate church teachings in order to comply.

Also involved are federal funds to various national and international humanitarian programs conducted by the Catholic church, including both domestic and international programs of Catholic Relief Services, unless those agencies include a full range of reproductive services to their clients.  Just last October federal funding ended for a successful USCCB Migration and Refugee Services program fighting human trafficking, simply because the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit claiming the program did not provide all legally available reproductive procedures (i.e., abortions, artificial contraceptives, etc.) to the victims of human trafficking. Bishop Lori wryly noted that the funding decision was not in response to the ACLU’s concern for religious freedom, but a conscious shift in federal policy that disregards the religious convictions of millions.

We should all lend or prayers and efforts to Bishop Lori and his new committee, which includes our own Bishop Flores, of the Diocese of Brownsville, to defend all aspects of religious liberty and to build bridges of ecumenical and interreligious collaboration across a broad spectrum of denominations across the country.

Religious liberty “is not merely a privilege that the government grants us and so may take away at will,” Bishop Lori stated.  “Instead, religious liberty is inherent in our very humanity, hard-wired into each and every one of us by our Creator.”

“Thus government has a perennial obligation to acknowledge and protect religious liberty as fundamental, no matter the moral and political trends of the moment. This insight as well is reflected in the laws and traditions of our country from its very inception. The Declaration of Independence boldly proclaimed as a self-evident truth that our inalienable rights are ‘endowed by our Creator’—not by the State,” Bishop Lori stated.